Stories

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Earlier this week Engine Yard launched a new Rails news website called Rails Dispatch, dedicated to provide timely releases of educational content. The first article is by Yehuda Katz entitled “How Rails 3 Makes your Life Better”, where he talks about some new features in Rails 3 as well as a screncast where he creates a Rails 3 blog in 18 minutes, without cheating (scaffolding).

On Wednesday Brian Mario released Mysql2, a simple and fast Mysql library for ruby which binds to libmysql. Not only does it cast values right into the correct Ruby objects but it's 25% faster then the existing Mysql gem (which only returns nil and String).

the validates_date_time gem from Nick Stenning extends the kinds of validations you can do in stock rails. It provides some string parsing, so you can assign strings of several different formats to date fields and have it 'just work'. You can also validate that dates are before or after dates, or between dates as well. And those dates can come from other fields in your model too.

Earlier this week Chad Fowler (@chadfowler) and Doug March (@marchdoe) released a website called Repopular which can show you the latest github projects mentions on twitter and noteworthy (popular) repos that many people have recently mentioned. Repopular makes it really easy to filter out the repos for Ruby, JavaScript, C, PHP, Python, and many other languages.

Find yourself looking through lots of hashes or ActiveRecord models on IRB or the Rails console, then you need to install awesome_print by Michael Dvorkin. Awesome_print uses proper indenting and colors to print hashes beautifully, allowing you to read through array’s of hashes without squinting.